This Independence Day, many American college leaders are worried about losing some essential parts of their enterprise: institutional autonomy and academic freedom.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration threatened to pull federal student aid from Harvard, accusing the school of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students during Gaza-related protests.
Harvard was already grappling with the loss of billions in research funding in its ongoing legal standoff with the administration. And then, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education quietly laid off its chief diversity officer and shut down its diversity, equity and inclusion office.
From GBH’s higher-ed desk, Kirk Carrapezza joined GBH’s All Things Considered guest host Saraya Wintersmith to discuss all of this and more. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Saraya Wintersmith: Let’s start with your latest reporting: Harvard’s education school is eliminating its DEI office. What do we know so far?
Kirk Carapezza: Chief Diversity Officer Jarrod Chin had only been in the role for a couple of years. Now, he’s out, and his team is being reassigned. Some are going to Student Affairs, others to HR.
Wintersmith: What’s Harvard saying in response?
Carapezza: Not much, officially. The school’s dean, Nonie Lesaux, and the university spokesperson didn’t respond to my request for comment.
But behind the scenes, I’m told Harvard is calling this a shift to a more “distributed model for DEI” — basically, a redistribution of resources. One faculty member put it more bluntly. She told me that when budgets get tight, DEI is usually the first to go.
The Education School is facing a multi-million-dollar shortfall. About half of its students are international, and many are from China. With all the uncertainty around student visas, the school is scrambling this summer to create some kind of online program, but the problem is that China doesn’t recognize online degrees from the U.S.
We should point out that the entire university has enacted a hiring freeze, and we’ve seen recent layoffs at the Kennedy School of Government.
Wintersmith: As you said, the now-former Chief Diversity Officer, Jarrod Chin, only recently stepped into this new role. What do we know about his time there?
Carapezza: He was appointed by former Dean Bridget Terry Long, who was a big backer of DEI. Chin started just weeks before the start of Israel-Hamas war, and the campus protests that followed.
You’ll remember it was a really tough time to lead a DEI office on campus. Students and faculty were struggling to talk across their differences. You had former Harvard President Larry Summers calling out then-President Claudine Gay and other leaders on social media, and after Trump was re-elected, his administration threatened to freeze funding unless Harvard changed its hiring and administration practices and dismantled all DEI programs.
In the end, I’m told Jarrod Chin was the last Harvard administrator with ‘diversity’ still in his title.
Wintersmith: Yeah. Back in the Spring, Harvard renamed its central DEI office, kind of shifting the focus to first-generation and low-income students, right?
Carapezza: That’s right. They also stopped funding affinity graduation ceremonies for students of color.
Now, Harvard says it wants to promote viewpoint diversity. President Garber has said open intellectual exchange in the classroom is critical to the success of the university. But none of that was enough for the Trump administration; it still froze billions in research funding and then threatened to block Harvard from enrolling any international students.
The university sued twice — first, over that research freeze, and then over the international student ban.
Wintersmith: So, where do those legal challenges stand, and what does all this mean for other schools?
Carapezza: Right now, a federal judge has paused the ban as these lawsuits continue to make their way through the court. On Monday, the Education Department’s antisemitism task force claimed Harvard is a “breeding ground for race discrimination” and accused the school of being deliberately indifferent to antisemitic harassment.
I spoke to Jon Fansmith, a higher ed lobbyist in D.C. with the American Council on Education. He told me this investigation echoes previous allegations the Trump administration has made against Harvard.
Jon Fansmith: “At least there was an attempt to document the assertions this time, but clearly no effort to work with the institution. No acknowledgement whatsoever of all the steps Harvard has taken — which have been pretty comprehensive — to address the problem. It’s messaging. It’s not substance.”
Carapezza: Harvard says it strongly disagrees with the government’s findings and has made serious efforts to combat both hate and bigotry on campus. While higher ed continues to take all these hits in public view, Jon Fansmith says he believes public opinion is starting to shift.
Fansmith: “Polling shows they don’t like what the administration is doing, and we see numerous accounts of internal debates from the administration that they realize they’re losing the messaging war — particularly to Harvard, but generally.
So, they’re trying to push harder. They’re trying to get some evidence of success in this area, when really, all they have to show for it is destroying a lot of productive research that’s good for our economy and good for our competitiveness.”
Carapezza: College leaders tell me that targeting student financial aid this way should concern all Americans because it threatens this central idea of American higher education that you should be able to attend any school that’s right for you.
Wintersmith: Kirk, all of this comes just days after the government put pressure on University of Virginia President James Ryan to resign over his support for DEI. How’s that landing locally?
Carapezza: It’s sending shockwaves through higher ed circles. Physical campuses are mostly empty, but everyone is texting and emailing each other.
Ryan was previously the Dean of Harvard’s Ed School in Cambridge, and in both of his roles — in Cambridge and in Charlottesville — he was known for championing first-generation students and students of color. His resignation was part of this Justice Department settlement that effectively ends UVA’s diversity programs.
We should point out that this is historic. It’s the first time the federal government has forced a university to remove its leader. One of Ryan’s former colleagues at the Ed School, Professor Paul Reville, says it’s hard to imagine a more upstanding public servant.
Paul Reville: “It’s an alarming intrusion on the prerogatives of higher education institutions — not only to educate students, but to do research and to be sources of independent thinking about what’s important for our country and for our communities.”
Carapezza: Others in Cambridge are really fearful, and they say it’s a dark day for UVA, for Harvard, and for the rest of higher ed. One professor, who fears being targeted, told me it all feels like an attempt to silence campus leaders so the administration can continue what she called its “campaign to deconstruct democracy.”
Wintersmith: Kirk, I’ve heard some college presidents are banding together under their own campaign, something called “From Campus to Community.”
Carapezza: Yes, and they’re posting some of their commencement speeches online. Wellesley College President Paula Johnson is one of them.
Back in May, she told graduates that the idea of academic freedom goes back to 19th-century Berlin and the first modern research university: Humboldt University. She said those German intellectuals argued that the pursuit of knowledge requires freedom.
Paula Johnson: “They caution that the state is never anything but an impediment as soon as it meddles directly in the production of knowledge. As you all know, we are in the midst of a degree of meddling that American colleges and universities have not seen since the McCarthy era in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. But academic freedom means that no one can force any member in this community to accept ideas that contradict the evidence or their best judgment.”
Carapezza: Johnson said that it’s astonishing that defending that idea now takes courage, but she said this moment in our history calls for it.